DEAF95 Symposium Interfacing Realities

The DEAF95 Symposium on November 24-25, 1995, focused on the main theme of the DEAF95 festival, INTERFACING REALITIES. An international group of researchers, scientists and artists discussed social, cultural, philosophical and technological questions related to human-machine interfaces, and gave demonstrations of the latest technical developments in this field.

Interacting with the world

Machines are not merely sophisticated tools devised and used by
humans. Their development especially in the modern era has provided ever
new perspectives onto and access to the world, machines have served us
to transform the world and have shaped our understanding of it. As
machines are becoming more important for our lives, the relationship
between humans and machines becomes an increasingly relevant factor in
social and cultural contexts. In this development, along with the
transforming experiences of reality, the self-perceptions of human
subjects are changing and might lead to new forms of personal and
communal identities.

Human-machine interfaces are designed to
lay links between human users and mechanical apparatuses. Understood in
the broadest sense, the interface is a coded matrix which allows for the
communication between different systems. In the case of the
human-machine interface, it is determined by the physiological,
psychological, and cultural conditions of humans, and by the technical,
mechanical and electronic, make-up of machines. Both the human cognitive
and sensory apparatus and the mechanical and electronic apparatus of
machines are subject to historical, social and cultural conditioning, a
fact that makes for a complex map of functions and modes of interaction
between the two. Information engineers, confronted with the difficulties
of devising a system of interfacial metaphors that can transcend such
cultural differentiations, are increasingly collaborating with artists
and graphic designers to find viable and creative solutions.

From
here, a host of questions branch out into philosophical, historical,
aesthetical, psychological and physiological terrains which it will be
impossible to deal with comprehensively at the symposium. What we can
aim for is to raise some of these questions and to develop an argument
about the way in which contemporary human-machine interfaces are
articulating our conceptions of reality, and about the factors which
determine the interaction between humans and machines with regard to the
paramenters of human existence as well as to technological
developments.

Machinic environments

In addition to the practical uses that humans have made of
machines, there is also a strong tradition to approach the machine on a
symbolic level and to use it as a metaphor for the different ways in
which humans engage with the world. However, that may be vacuous
distinction.

The predominant notion of the interface assumes a
dualistic opposition between human individuals and machines. A crucial
question is how the human individual with its cognitive apparatus can
best learn to interact with machines, and how machines are made to
understand what humans want. The interface is conceptualised as a
represent-ational screen between human and machine through which they
are enabled to comm-unicate with each other: for example, on the remote
control of a television set, a series of buttons with coded signs, icons
and numbers allows the human user to control the technical apparatus of
the tv. Such patterns, codes, or languages, are based on a deep
reservoir of historical, cultural and social determinants which were
part of human communication long before the computer. The computer,
however, appears to radical-ise the problem of the interface. In the
case of recent computer technology as well as its application in, for
instance, medicine or biotechnology, the interface as a separate matrix
tends to disappear in favour of an ever closer interlinking of the human
body and the machine in increasingly immersive virtual and physical
environments.

A dominant trend in interface design is the
creation of intuitive, subtle interfaces which take the limitations of
the human sensory and cognitive apparatus into account and which seek to
narrow the gap between human and machine by an adaptation of the
latter, and an enhancement of the sensory apparatus of the former. By
means of such interfaces, the contemporary user of technology is
confronted with new worlds, new levels of information which create new
realities.

The question arises, whether in such environments the
human subject will still be an outside observer of the world: the
modern individual traditionally experienced itself as a separate entity
outside of the machine. The new human experience - from the ubiquitous
accessibility through wireless telecommunication to the prothetical
connection to virtual worlds - is one of the body becoming an
inseparable part of the interfacial set-up. If we apply a wider
understanding of the notion of the machine as a formation with discrete
parts working together to perform work, the same 'machinic'
organisational model can be applied to living bodies and to mechanical
apparatuses. Examples of such machines include apparatuses for
industrial production as well as the human unconscious or biotopes. In
this scenario, the organic body and the mechanic apparatus are neither
antagonistically opposed nor models or metaphors for each other, but
functions of similar formations. The distinction made between the
organic and the mechanical would then be one of ontological convention.

This
raises important anthropological questions. The interface is not only a
technical problem, but a problem of how humans represent to themselves
their relationship towards a world in which they strive to experience
themselves as separate and autonomous individuals. What happens if this
separation between the self and its symbolic representation is inverted
and the human individual experiences itself as a symbolic
representation, or as an interface?

At DEAF 95, there will be
exhibitions and presentations of art projects which explore the
practical and theoretical possibilities and ramifications of
human-machine interfaces in an increasingly dynamic reality. They
address the new developments of interaction and communication with
regard to the shared knowledge and established cultural patterns through
which human communities are formed, and investigate the new fields of
interaction where we are confronted with as yet unknown, often
incomprehensible features of realities and in which we experience
ourselves as unrooted and mere relational entities. - The symposium will
deal with the interfacial translations of those new dimensions in a
cultural, philosophical, an anthropological perspective. Its
interdisciplinary make-up will offer a special opportunity for a review
of the transforming differences and similarities between human and
machine, and for the attempt to assess the quality of the distance
between them through a discussion of the interface as a site of dynamic
interaction.

Introduction by José van Dijck

Abstracts and lectures

Agents in Animation: Michael B. Johnson

I've long dreamt of being able to construct my own characters;
characters that had a life of their own but were willing and able to let
me share in their worlds and experience. In my mind's eye, I always saw
them as fully three-dimensional, living in combinations of
photorealistic and sketchy cartoon worlds. As a child I built characters
constantly, acting out roles with toy soldiers and "action figures",
building complex structures out of wood and mud; moving whole cities and
armies around with my hand and my mind.

But until we can credibly talk about how a character was constructed,
until we can debug them when they do something entirely unexpected,
until we can articulate what trade-offs were made in its design and
implementation -- in short, until we address the character construction
process, we have little chance of making measurable progress in our
desire to populate virtual environments with 3D semi-autonomous animated
characters.

This problem is exacerbated when we start trying to work together on
characters -- disparate artisans trying to package up their
contributions for their collaborators.

What's so fascinating about the promise of doing this in the digital
domain is the fact that the experience, the entire experience of what
transpired, can be recorded. Recorded for reuse, appropriation,
reexperience in a different form or resolution -- all of these become
possible as we bring our characters to life in the digital domain. Our
task is to decide how we can build them so that this can happen.

Robotic Agents: Dave Cliff

Dave Cliff's presentation gave an overview of his "evolutionary
robotics" research, showing examples of the process in action. As the
evolution takes place in simulation, it is necessary to invest effort in
constructing interfaces for visualisation of, and interaction with, the
ongoing evolutionary process. There are also issues in understanding
how the agents "interface" with their own sensory environments or
perceptual worlds: any truly autonomous agent constructs its own
reality, on the basis of its sensory-motor interactions with its
environment. This is true of humans, houseflies, robots, and software
agents. Visualising and understanding the realities of other agents can
be a challenging problem.

Introducing Agents: Peter Beyls

During the last few years the idea of exploring the agent paradigm has
been persuasive in many computer related endeavours ranging from
software engineering, the study of mobile robot ecologies, user
interface design and human-computer interaction to cognitive modelling
and the arts; in particular behavioural computer animation and
artificial life inspired interactive works of art -- yet, there is by no
means a generally accepted definition of what an agent really is. An
agent is usually thought of as an active entity that does not live in
isolation but is receptive and adaptive towards a dynamic context.

Software agents are specialised modules that aim to collaborate with
fellow agents as well as with the user in a wish to solve problems in a
common effort. Some even think of agents as personal assistants that
learn from instructive feedback from a human interactor. Hardware agents
are rooted in the real world, capable to adjust their behaviour
according to their perception of an unpredictable environment. If one
sees computers as cognitive partners in the act of artistic creation,
agent technology has rich potential from a pragmatic, metaphorical or
conceptual point of view. For instance, a musical conversation between
human- and virtual musicians is easily modelled as a collection of
agents exhibiting conflicting requirements: agents wish to express a
personal character while also aiming for integration into a larger
social context. Agents readily accommodate this type of distributed,
social computation.

In a wider sense, agents could be viewed as a form of social computing
from at least two other points of view. First, in analogy with examples
of self-organising behaviour as observed in nature, a distributed
society of artificial agents exhibits complex intelligent behaviour from
the local interaction of many units of simple expertise. Second, many
projects embracing the agent paradigm express concern with the quality
of the interaction channel with a human user in addition to questioning
deep qualitative capacities in agents: how could an agent learn about
being responsible and, should our involvement with agents extend to the
emotional level?

How can we tell if we are part of a Global Brain?: Gottfried Mayer-Kress

The dream of an omnipresent spirit that connects every being in the
universe probably is as old as mankind itself. The general idea has gone
through many different manifestations and reincarnations. From
omniscient gods that determine our lives to the "Net of Indra" that
reflects every jewel at each crossing in every other jewel, Hegel's
"Weltgeist", and to Sheldrake's "morphogenetic fields" we observe a
desire of being part of a structure on a higher organizational level.

In the early eighties P. Russell made the observation of a symmetry in
the hierarchy of levels of complexity that involves the number tttt (ten
to the tenth = ten billion): If we take tttt atoms, connect them in a
smart way, we can build bio-molecules such as DNA, the carrier of our
genetic heritage. If we connect tttt molecules in a smart way we can
build living cells such as bacteria. If we connect tttt cells together
in a smart way, we can build organisms such as conscious brains. The
question we can start to ask today is what happens if we connect tttt
human brains together in a smart way.

In our presentation we discuss why we think that the global connections
that we have today through the Internet is "smart" enough (compared to
phone, fax, TV, etc.) that we can begin to speculate about the emergence
of globally connected, virtual, information structures, "Global Brains"
and the consequences on an individual and global level.

Wild Nature, Free Radicals, and The Nerve Sell....: Timothy Druckrey

The collision of molecular biology and cyberscience in the fast-growing
fields of networking, DNA-based computer programming and nanotechnology
suggests the reconceptualization of the subject of computing. Rather
than the human-computer interface, the thrust of so much current
research is bio- or neuro-informatics.

As a historically
developing means of control, technology itself is mutating into
meta-technology. Questions of machine intelligence and political
empowerment are becoming questions of artificial life and massive -
albeit invisible - parallelism. Subsumed in the immaterial space of
information, culture, the sphere of public action, is destabilized as a
sphere of knowledge, a sphere of discourse, a sphere of difference, and a
site of action. Ubiquitous computing, the "intelligent ambience," the
wired world, only serve to suggest the clear fact that the triumph of
technology has already occurred and that the shift from agency to
behavior has become the focal point of technology research. Rather than
liberating, the trajectory of so much of this work is to map, to record,
to simulate, and to produce behavior.

Moreover, these
technologies contribute to the transformation of the social logic of
civiliation. Technoculture's spectacle is that of distributed thinking,
distributed text, distributed politics, and distributed identities. In
the many metaphors that are emerging, the fragmentation of form and the
prioritizing of content are the most obvious. But amid the numerous
rationales for the logic of distributed culture is emerging a renewed
sense of totality too often identified as a unified theory - a sort of
born-again modernism in the guise of mastery of the system of cognition,
biology and social logic.

The invention of technologies that transmit signal, image, letter,
sound, moving image, live sound, live image, sense and action,
intersense and interaction, presence, interpresence, telepresence,
underscores our desire to transcend the narrow here-and-now. However,
until this moment, the technologies that would allow the transmission of
space have been unimaginable. A barrier has broken: not only have we
created virtual communities within nonlocal, transphysical, public
realms, we are now able to exercise the most radical gesture:
distributing space, transmitting architecture.
Transmit, but also transgress, transcend, translate, transliterate...
The prefix trans~ signifies "beyond, across, through, so as to change".
Transarchitecture, transurbanism, transhumanity...
Every encounter is a problem of interfacing realities, ours and theirs,
yours and mine. What characterizes our present situation is not simply
the problem of the interface, but the problem of the interface with what
is alien. The alien is that which cannot be reached by the traversal of
contiguous contexts. Our parallel exploration of networked
telecommunications and virtual environments have brought together two
distant frontiers, those of the inner and the outer alien, while the
anonymity and non-locality inherent in the hyperlink hyperleap have
allowed us direct access to the aliens in our midst, at our own level.
As we advance in the construction of cyberspace in its actual, virtual,
and cyborg senses, we will build transmissible cities that act as
interfaces and interpreters to these encounters. Until now the alien has
been that which was remote enough to be strange. As distances collapse
at the speed of light, we will discover the alien that is so near as to
be outlandish. We will become citizens in the spaces of our varied
consciousnesses.

Interface/recoupment/subject - Thinking the boundary, making it flexible, keeping it experiential: Siegfried Zielinski

Beyond its ontological comprehensibility, yet still on this side of a
living subject. Wittgenstein construes the subject as a boundary (to the
world). This is helpful. The interface not as a surface of the machinic
which has to be designed, nor as an extended sensorium of MediaMan, but
as a movement, as a ridge walk. -- Once again in the history of the
media the aim of the hegemonic discourse is to make them invisible and
intangible, in the vanishing point of the perfect illusion. The
apparatus theory reenacted it theoretically: recoupment. This is my
starting point, and I plea for its active manipulation and for keeping
it alive. So long as the boundary is not dead there is no reason to hold
funeral sermons for the subject.

Life in the machine: we can interface to it, but will it be interested in us?: Thomas S. Ray

The process of evolution by natural selection is able to create complex
and beautiful information processing systems, such as primate nervous
systems. Recent experiments demonstrate that evolution by natural
selection is able to operate effectively in genetic languages based on
the machine codes of digital computers. This opens up the possibility of
using evolution to generate complex software. How can we provoke
evolution to transform simple algorithms into software of vast
complexity?

Evolution of complexity occurs in the context of an ecological community
of interacting evolving species. A large and complex environment
consisting of partially isolated habitats differing and occasionally
changing in environmental conditions would be the most conducive to a
rapid increase in diversity and complexity. Due to its size, topological
complexity, and dynamically changing form and conditions, the global
network of computers appears to be an ideal habitat for the evolution of
complex digital organisms.

The proposed project will create a very large, complex and
inter-connected region of cyberspace that will be inoculated with
digital organisms which will be allowed to evolve freely through natural
selection. The objective is to set off a digital analog to the Cambrian
explosion of diversity, in which multi-cellular digital organisms
(parallel MIMD processes) will spontaneously increase in diversity and
complexity. If successful, this evolutionary process will allow us to
find the natural form of parallel and distributed processes, and will
generate extremely complex digital information processes that fully
utilize the capacities inherent in our parallel and networked hardware.

Interfaces to the Sublime: Mark Pesce

In almost a decade of research, the field of virtual
reality, cyberspace, immersion (whatever you choose to call
it) has produced few works of art that can be said to articulate
an aesthetic -- in truth, most are prosaic beyond boredom.
With the widespread availability of cyberspace -- with the
presence and adoption of VRML (or something very much like
it) -- the number of works created for cyberspace will increase
dramatically. These creators have no examples to draw from
-- for, as Picasso said, good artists copy, great artists
steal -- the treasury is almost empty. How can we expect
appropriation from the Void?

Four works fundamental
to the formation of an immersant aesthetic will be examined:
CyberFin, a dolphin swim simulator which uses aural technology
to create a trans-species sensual remapping, making the
immersant experience sound as the dolphin does; PLACEHOLDER,
which uses mythology to engender ontology in an environment
where place (a body of evoked feelings) was as important
as space; Danger: Brain Injury, in which the immersant passes
from well-being into a condition of organic damage, effectively
seeing the world through another's eyes; and Osmose, which
coupled innovative interface technology with a numinous
artistic representation of a hyper-natural world which opens
the immersant to a sublime experience. Each of these pieces
ostensibly has little to do with any other, yet they each
speak to the same parts of the immersant self. What can
we learn from their commonalties which might help us to
articulate an immersant aesthetic? Finally we'll look at
the Plutonian Mass, which combines archetype, myth and cyberspace,
creating a sacred place within cyberspace.

Vision in Motion: Stacey Spiegel

A modernist perspective might suggest that the history of visualization
is not relevant to understanding the evolution of cyberspace. This
reflects the ahistorical position of modernism and has contributed to
our post-industrial malaise of dislocation and disorientation. Now,
Marshall McLuhan has argued in contrast that every new technology builds
on the content of the old technology. Discussions of virtuality have
not only been ahistorical, but they have also been a-aesthetic in that
they address the flow of information without reference to either
experience or consciousness.
The work Crossings presented on the Rotterdam Harbour simulator is an
exploration of Cyberspace as a perceptual and cognitive vehicle. In this
collaborative environment we are extending the range of potential
interactivity to achieve a clearer intersection of media ( technology)
and the content of perceptual experience. Art is not merely
transcriptive in the sense of conveying information, but is also a
transformative process which results in a construction and
reconstruction of reality as an aesthetic experience. Crossings is a
non-hierarchical model that, like a multi-layered tapestry, links
information with aesthetic experience. This has clear ethical
implications because the activity of generating meaningful perception
reconnects individuals with a sense of location and orientation. The
traditional distinction between reality and virtuality disappears when
the artificial dualism of information and sensation is eliminated as is
the case in "Crossings."